Language class in Mexico

You learn; more than Spanish, and meet some nice people, too

Author: By Richard Kindleberger, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, November 29, 1998

Page: M1

Section: Travel

Before us stood a large sign with a pointed warning. To ``avoid going to prison,'' we should fess up now to any guns, explosives, or cartridges we might be carrying. The crowd in front of us, by appearance overwhelmingly Mexican or Mexican-American, fed their luggage into the X-ray machine and moved forward at the blink of a green light. Our bags were then pulled inside by a conveyor belt only to have the light flash red. It seemed, if only for an instant, that we might be on our way to Morelia's equivalent of the Tijuana jail.

We never found out what triggered the alarm. We were directed to a table where a customs official, after asking if we were tourists, waved us through without so much as a glance inside our bags. And so began our little adventure south of the border. In two weeks we learned a fair amount of Spanish and met nice people from both sides of the Rio Grande. We also had our eyes opened to a world that we, like many Americans, knew remarkably little about, given that Mexico is our next-door neighbor as well as a major trading partner.

Morelia, three hours west of Mexico City, is a bustling city of 800,000. That makes it bigger than Boston, but it is a place I had never heard of until I started looking into Spanish language schools last winter. Glance at a map of the hot Mexican tourist destinations and Morelia is nowhere to be seen. It lacks the glitz of Acapulco or Puerto Vallarta or the excitement of Mexico City. Most of the Americans you run into are there to study Spanish.

But Morelia is a tourist destination for Mexicans and, along with the surrounding area, has its share of attractions. Its 6,300-foot elevation gives it a pleasant climate, without the layer of smog choking Mexico City. Unlike many supposedly more sophisticated towns, Morelia never knocked down older structures to make way for glassy skyscrapers. Centuries-old colonial architecture is everywhere. It seems unbelievable for a city of nearly 1 million, but the only buildings in Morelia that rise more than two or three stories are the cathedrals.

One of its most striking features is a beautiful stone aqueduct, built in 1785, that boasts 253 arches and runs for blocks on the east side of the city. Off to one side, a block or two from CMI, is the much-photographed Tarascas Fountain with its statue of three native women holding a large tray of fruit to the sky. During our visit, boisterous young people threw a number of unwary onlookers into the fountain to celebrate Mexico's advance in the World Cup after it tied Holland.

Carrie and I got a glimpse almost immediately of the economic woes that continue to afflict Mexico four years after the financial crisis that came with devaluation. The man who came to pick us up at the airport, with his wife and son, was an unemployed veterinarian. Unable to find work in the field he was trained in, Pedro Rangel shoots photographs and video of weddings and graduations. He and his wife, Carmen, are also enthusiastic hosts to foreign visitors who, like us, hope to supplement classroom instruction in Spanish with the experience of living with a Mexican family.

The small weekly stipend a student pays through the school for a ``homestay,'' providing a bed and three meals a day, is negligible by American standards but a welcome boost in family income for many host families. To the disappointment of the Rangels, there were not enough students signed up that week in June for Centro Mexicano Internacional's immersion Spanish program to require their hospitality. Their contribution was reduced to odd jobs, like driving Carrie and me between Morelia and the airport and taking pictures at the fiesta thrown by the school for visiting students.

My hosts were a semiretired orthopedic surgeon of 70 and his wife. I was advised in advance by the school that ``la senora'' was a terrific cook, and it turned out to be no exaggeration. The doctor, born to poverty and fatherless from infancy, was a twinkly-eyed raconteur who tried to speak slowly for my benefit but whom I still frequently found difficult to follow.

Carrie stayed with my hosts' daughter and her family a few miles away on the outskirts of the city. The daughter was a social worker, her husband a cheery and prosperous sheet rock contractor. Our first day in Morelia, he drove me to his country club, where I drank a beer under an umbrella on the patio while he worked out in the gym. There were two girls in the family, 17 and 15, and 12-year-old Pepito, who spent much of his free time playing video games with Carrie and trading the Spanish and English equivalents for such key phrases as ``push the button.''

On Day 1 of our language program, the doctor gave me directions from his centrally located house to the school, a mile away. ``You can't miss it,'' I think he said in Spanish. But, of course, I took a wrong turn and did. Walking into the 8:30 a.m. placement test 15 minutes late only to confront the ever-baffling question of when to use the subjunctive, and when not, was a little unnerving. But after all, what were they going to do -- flunk me? It turned out my efforts with language tapes and weekly sessions with a Cuban-born tutor had not been totally wasted. I ended up placed in an interesting group of five Americans who were reasonably adept in conversational Spanish. They included a 27-year-old from Iowa who had just completed his first year teaching high school Spanish and a college student from Texas who was aiming to become a missionary. There was also a political science professor from Rock Springs, Wyo., and a high school English teacher who grew up in Andover, Mass., and now lives on an island off Seattle.

CMI occupies a handsome old building, near the center of town, whose most attractive feature is a large courtyard in the middle. Our school day began with two hours of grammar taught by Lucia, a friendly Mexican woman in her early 30s. After break, a young mother of two named Yvonne took over with two hours of conversation. We usually had a modest amount of homework, but the learning continued throughout the day, in school and out.

These programs are a great way to study a language, see another country, and get know to know the people by living with a family. With the rapid growth of Spanish as the second language of the United States, programs like CMI's have been coming on strong. But you'd never guess it from the experience in Mexico this summer. After recording its record summer enrollment last year, CMI suffered almost a 50 percent drop in students signed up this summer.

The reason for staying away was readily apparent -- two ongoing news stories that did not exactly lay out the welcome mat for people thinking of heading south of the border. Violent crime was reported to be surging in Mexico City, and in late spring there were reports of smoke blanketing large parts of Mexico as a result of out-of-control burning in the countryside. One instructor in the school's summer master's program for Spanish teachers was so unnerved that he reneged on his teaching commitment two days before he was due to arrive, according to Rebeca Alfaro, CMI's director of operations.

As it turned out, the problems in other parts of Mexico that made the headlines did not really apply to Morelia. The frightening crimes reported against tourists in Mexico City, and the horrifying rape-murder in March of a Vermont woman near the Pacific resort town of Puerto Escondido, did not say much about the more low-key Morelia. Not that crime is a stranger here, but it tends to be more the nuisance variety, like burglaries and pickpocketing, Alfaro said. She said there had not been a crime reported by a Spanish student in a year and a half, since a man said police picked him up and demanded money after falsely accusing him of being involved in drugs. As for the smoke, ``We didn't have any in Morelia,'' Alfaro said. Others agreed.

CMI is not the only Spanish language program for foreigners in Morelia. Others are Centro Cultural de Lenguas and Instituto Baden Powell. Many such programs, in other Mexican cities and in other Spanish-speaking countries as well, have their own Web sites. Alternatively, one can sort through the possibilities with the help of a feeder service based in the United States. I used Louise Harber's Foreign Language Study Abroad Service, in South Miami. Another is Charlene Biddulph's Language Studies Abroad, in Solana Beach, Calif.

As I probably should have anticipated, two weeks turned out to be too brief to achieve a breakthrough in my Spanish. The reality dawned on Day 8, when I called a local restaurant to make a reservation for the following night. I wanted to take our two home-stay families to dinner as a way of thanking them. ``Su nombre, por favor,'' the woman on the other end of the line asked again, with some impatience. I had already told her how many we would be, so my frustration was rising as well. Then it dawned on me she was asking, quite reasonably, for my name, not the number in our party. As my daughter might say, ``Duh.''